shooting disaster!

P

powerdog

Veteran
I've been happy with DVRack for a long time, recording QT to a recent PC laptop and moving the files over to my G5 via a portable drive.
Yesterday, a full day of shooting. Approx. every other clip I'd play back a minute or two to make sure sound and video were OK. Both seemed fine.
Today I exported the clips from DVR, copied them to a portable drive, and copied from there to my Mac.
Each clip is either silent or sounds like it has heavy sci-fi effects -- mostly reverb and stuttering. It's also not consistent, a given piece of footage will be silent or weird at various times. The sound is also not synced to the video in any way, and the video often just freezes.
I ran a disk maintenance utlility on the PC and defragged just before the shoot.
The DVRack people had never heard of this. The DVX and laptop are the same as before. What bothers me isn't having to reshoot -- he's a nice guy -- but knowing I have to set up more shoots without a clue what happened or how to prevent it.
MAJOR KARMA POINTS to anyone who offers any advice/suggestions. Thanks.
 
No, sometimes I get sound and sometimes not.

But I have a theory now: the portable USB 2 HD that I use only for transferring files between the internal Mac and PC drives seems to be corrupted. It shows up on the PC as unformatted. And it can't be formatted, for some reason, as either FAT32 or NTSF because you can't select a formatting option. Some short test clips I did today (before I looked at the drive) worked ok, but I think maybe longer clips (my actual clips averaged about 12 minutes) are more dependent on the integrity of the drive's formatting. Of course, I made the mistake of choosing "move" instead of "copy" so all of yesterday's work is probably dead and gone.
 
Powerdog, how many times have you used this usb drive to transfer? If it has worked fine in the past what is it you are doing differently? Have you always transfered from pc to mac with no problems? I am just wondering if this usb drive is compatible with your Mac? And now suddenly since you connected it to the mac the drive doesn't open on your pc... got to love it. I have both and i know the feeling. Moving the clips shouldn't have "moved" or corrupted the video files, it should have copied them; although it is usb... In either case now they dont "work." Since you moved them without copying and you can't move them back try re-exporting from DVRack or even try exporting a different format from QT (i dont use DVR but it's just a thought). That will tell you if it is a drive issue or a Quicktime/DVR issue; i think. :huh: Instead of using a drive to transfer, burn the files to a disk and try opening them up in QT 1st not FCP.
 
Could be a corrupted drive. The symptoms you mention are typical of a codec that isn't fully recognized/compatable with QuickTime. If you can't reformat the drive, I'd look into buying a new one. And get a Firewire drive at that. But that's just what "I" would do. Once a drive starts to act up like that, it's usually only a matter of time before it dies altogether.
 
Ben, I read your mind. Buying a new drive tomorrow. Even if I could repair the old one, I'd never trust it again.
 
It wasn't the drive. In fact, the QT clips only look/sound right through DVR itself. On both PC and Mac, they're terrible with other players. AVI clips, however, play fine on both. My hunch is that there's something wrong with the latest implementation of QT in DVR.
 
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